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she said, wiping her nose, “I’m so damn helpless. Who would believe me?”
    “I would. I do.”
    “And who’s going to believe you, Nolly?” She returned the hand-pat to show she didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. “If you had anything convincing to say you would have been talking to the cops long ago, right?”
    “Well, but the two of us together …”
    She looked levelly at me, waiting for me to figure out the end of the sentence for myself. I did. I shrugged.
    She said simply, “Forget that.” She rummaged in her handbag again. I thought it was for another Kleenex, but what came out was a couple of sheets of Xerox paper, stapled together and folded several times. She pulled one set of pages off and handed them to me. “Take a look at this, Nolly. I practically had to sleep with a guy from the Wall Street Journal to get it.”
    I unfolded and glanced at the heading: “Estimated Balance Sheet for Narabedla Ltd. Unofficial.”
    It was unofficial, all right. It was the Journal staff’s best guesses about some very well kept financial secrets. Vic had told me they didn’t have to file very many reports. They certainly didn’t volunteer any. Almost every line was marked “Estimated” or “Provisional” or “Projected from Earlier Data.”
    But what it added up to was—remarkable.
    I knew the huge empire called Narabedla Ltd. was huge. I hadn’t known about the shipbuilding firm in Taiwan, or the Japanese computer company. I had no idea Narabedla held such large interests in a hundred American firms. None of your standard blue chips. Better than the blue chips. The list included most of the biggest money-spinners in the high-tech industries. Gene-splitting. Computers. Industrial chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Avionics. If a company was going somewhere fast in a growing market, Narabedla owned a piece of it. A big piece. This summary changed my idea of what “big” meant. By these figures, Ford, ITT, any of the companies of Big Oil—Narabedla was right up there with them, and could maybe have bought and sold some of them.
    Irene asked, “Did you read the part about the lawyers?” I had. I hadn’t missed its significance. Not one but four of the hottest, winningest firms in the country were on retainer to Narabedla. Which meant to Henry Davidson-Jones. Which meant …
    I sighed and put the paper in my pocket. “Legal-wise,” I said, “they could kill us.”
    She set her chin. “All the same, the son of a bitch kidnapped my cousin.”
    I said reasonably, “We don’t know that for sure. We certainly don’t have a clue about any motive.”
    “Sex, Nolly!” She pointed to the yacht across the bay. “Sure, that sounds crazy. A man like Henry Davidson-Jones wouldn’t have to kidnap good-looking women and lock them up in a harem. God, his big problem ought to be fighting them off! But if he did do that, what better place could there be to do it in than a yacht like that? You could hide half an army. Forty or fifty screaming harem girls would be nothing.”
    “Irene,” I said soothingly, “that wouldn’t account for cellists and baritones.”
    “So maybe he’s gay, too. Or maybe he likes music when he makes love.” She scowled at-me. “I don’t know why, I just know that, and if you’ve got a better theory, tell me what it is.”
    I didn’t have a better theory, of course. I only had a whole lot of doubt and confusion. I said, “It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of.”
    And that was true. But I hadn’t then been to the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.

 
CHAPTER

7
     
     
    T hings did start to get really crazy about then. I got pretty crazy myself. I found myself doing things that I was very sure Marlene would have defined as meshuggeneh, and I wouldn’t have had any right to disagree.
    We took the elevator down to the lobby of the hotel, way at the bottom of the casino’s hill. I found a pay phone, collected a stack of those dumb little French telephone